Social groups: religious groups and communities Books

Book SynopsisThere is widespread concern today about the “radicalization” of young muslim men, and the deprived areas of Western cities are believed to have become breeding grounds of home-grown extremism. But how do young Muslims growing up in the cities of the West really live? This book takes us beyond the rhetoric and into the housing estates on the outskirts of Paris to meet Adama, Radouane, Hassan, Tarik, Marley, and a shadowy figure whose name suddenly and brutally became known to the world at the time of the Charlie Hebdo shootings: Amédy Coulibaly. Seeing Amédy through the eyes of close friends and other young Muslim men in the neighbourhoods where they grew up, Fabien Truong uncovers a network of competing loyalties and maps the road these youths take to resolve the conflicts they face: becoming Muslim. For these young men, Islam stands, often alone, as a resource, a gateway – as if it were the last route to “escape” without betrayal and to “fight” in a meaningful and noble way. Becoming Muslim does not necessarily lead to the radicalized “other”. It is more like a long-distance race, a powerful reconversion of the self that allows for introspection and change. But it can also lead to a belligerent presentation of the self that transforms a dead-end into a call to arms.Trade Review"Truong vividly describes the lives of young men from immigrant backgrounds in the Paris banlieue, charting their trajectories from dropping out of school towards crime and then prison. This is an extremely valuable book, rich in ethnographic detail and very well written: I was irresistibly drawn in to this world of kickbacks, payoffs and unsettlingly deep resentment against the whole of French society."—David Lehmann, University of Cambridge, UK "Truong take us deep inside the personal world of six immigrant young men from France's disreputable urban periphery. He shows how they navigate the promises and demands of the school, the street economy, the prison and the police, and why they are attracted (or not) by Islam as a 'floating political imaginary.' An insightful and urgent contribution to the analysis of the social fabrication of terrorists that punctures the sonorous but empty notion of 'radicalization.'"—Loïc Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley "It is not a clash of civilizations that Fabien Truong vividly describes but a collapse of communities, as young men in transitional stages of their life search for significance in the West's Muslim diaspora. If you want to understand how most overcome feelings of rootlessness and despair and how a few become jihadis, read this book."—Scott Atran, CNRS, Paris, and University of Oxford "... an excellent ethnography of Muslim masculinity."—Times Higher Education "... a thoughtful, well-crafted ethnography that humanizes the faceless, amorphous 'Muslim youth' of the French banlieues."—Los Angeles Review of Books "Radicalized Loyalties is an outstanding study of the social worlds of immigrant young men living in the urban periphery of Paris.... The book will be of great interest to scholars within the cross-disciplinary field of (counter)terrorism studies as well as to social scientists and anthropologists interested in state-margin relationships, Islam, the secular state, and the administration of the urban periphery in the West."EthnosTable of ContentsNote to the Reader Acknowledgements Introduction: The call of the ground Friday the 13th Behind absurdity, the social world The magic of "radicalization" A bad religion for "bad seeds"? Finding Allah at street-level Chapter 1: Common histories Making a home in public housing: a French history "Boys will be boys" Conflicting loyalties, recognition of debts "A white fence-post in a dark forest" Rebels without a cause, or a cause without rebels? Chapter 2: On the margins of the city Imprints of school The incompleteness of le business Common criminals Masculine machines Police, death, and hatred: a political trinity Chapter 3: Reconversions Being or becoming Muslim? The "community" illusion The Koran: reading and sharing In the here and now: getting better Beyond the here and now: being the best The value of reconversion and the reconversion of values Chapter 4: War and Peace Turning thirty: the verdict Toward a sociology of inner peace Kif-kif Desires for Syria: going off to war, over there "I am Amédy": at war, over here Epilogue Notes Index

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Book SynopsisSecrecy and Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature examines the strategies of esoteric writing that Kabbalists have used to conceal secrets in their writings, such that casual readers will only understand the surface meaning of their texts while those with greater insight will grasp the internal meaning. In addition to a broad description of esoteric writing throughout the long literary history of Kabbalah, this work analyzes kabbalistic secrecy in light of contemporary theories of secrecy. It also presents case studies of esoteric writing in the work of four of the first kabbalistic authors—Abraham ben David, Isaac the Blind, Ezra ben Solomon, and Asher ben David—and thereby helps recast our understanding of the earliest stages of kabbalistic literary history. The book will interest scholars in Jewish mysticism and Jewish philosophy, as well as those working in medieval Jewish history. Throughout, Jonathan V. Dauber has endeavored to write an accessible work that does not require extensive prior knowledge of kabbalistic thought. Accordingly, it finds points of contact between scholars of various religious traditions.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Translations of Biblical Verses Introduction. The Writing of Secrets Chapter 1. Secrets and Secretism Chapter 2. A Typology of Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature Chapter 3. Abraham ben David as an Esoteric Writer Chapter 4. Isaac the Blind’s Literary Legacy Chapter 5. Ezra ben Solomon of Gerona as an Esoteric Writer Chapter 6. Esotericism and Divine Unity in R. Asher ben David Conclusion Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA wave of plague swept the cities of northern Italy in 1630–31, ravaging Christian and Jewish communities alike. In Writing Plague Susan L. Einbinder explores the Hebrew texts that lay witness to the event. These Jewish sources on the Great Italian Plague have never been treated together as a group, Einbinder observes, but they can contribute to a bigger picture of this major outbreak and how it affected people, institutions, and beliefs; how individuals and institutions responded; and how they did or did not try to remember and memorialize it. High self-consciousness characterizes many of the authorial voices, and the sophisticated and deliberate ways these authors represented themselves reveal a complex process of self-fashioning that equally contours the representation and meaning of plague. Conversely, it is under the strain of plague that conventions of self-fashioning come to the fore. In the end, what proves most striking is how quickly these accounts retreated into obscurity. Why was this plague, which was among the most documented of all outbreaks since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, ultimately consigned to silence in Jewish memory? Did the memory take shape outside the written or material remains that we typically consult, in ephemeral forms that were lost over time? How much were the official genres of commemoration responsible for the erosion of historical particularity? How much did these conventionalized forms of mourning help individuals find language for private experience? And how, conversely, was private experience reconfigured to signify public grief? Throughout Writing Plague, Einbinder unearths and analyzes a cluster of little-known texts, reading them as much for the things about which they remain silent as for the things they seem openly to express. It is a compelling hybrid work of literary criticism and historical reflection about premodern constructions of self and community.Trade Review"With its close readings and reconstructions that are at once imaginative and provocatively tempting, [Writing Plague] operates as a master class in literary sensitivity and literary interpretation in historical context. The final product is a book is written with a sensibility that is informed by sophisticated self-consciousness, drawn from insights from the social sciences but in a manner of the author’s own originality. Einbinder muses on the very mechanisms and media through which we come to grips with epidemic events, pushing back against the absolute claims of narrative in favor of a panoply of ways of writing, thinking, and experiencing plague. In Einbinder’s hands and through her eyes, the texts come to life with empathy and in their fullness, opening up windows into the collective and personal experiences of plague, and onto plague as an occasion to understand the very values that made up a selection of early modern selves." * The Marginalia Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisJewish Blues presents a broad cultural, social, and intellectual history of the color blue in Jewish life between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Bridging diverse domains such as religious law, mysticism, eschatology, as well as clothing and literature, this book contends that, by way of a protracted process, the color blue has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves. In ancient Jewish texts, the term for blue, tekhelet, denotes a dye that serves Jewish ritual purposes. Since medieval times, however, Jews gradually ceased to use tekhelet in their ritual life. In the nineteenth century, however, interest in restoring ancient dyes increased among European scholars. In the Jewish case, rabbis and scientists attempted to reproduce the ancient tekhelet dye. The resulting dyes were gradually accepted in the ritual life of many Orthodox Jews. In addition to being a dye playing a role in Jewish ritual, blue features prominently in the Jewish mystical tradition, in Jewish magic and popular custom, and in Jewish eschatology. Blue is also representative of the Zionist movement, and it is the only chromatic color in the national flag of the State of Israel. Through the study of the changing roles and meanings attributed to the color blue in Judaism, Jewish Blues sheds new light on the power of a visual symbol in shaping the imagination of Jews throughout history. The use of the color blue continues to reflect pressing issues for Jews in our present era, as it has become a symbol of Jewish modernity.Trade Review"Gadi Sagiv’s Jewish Blues masterfully unravels the history of tekhelet, a biblically mandated blue pigment that was lost in antiquity, discussed by legalists, exegetes, and mystics for millennia, and rediscovered with messianic verve in recent decades. Sagiv has created a deeply polychrome and compelling narrative that stretches the blue thread of Jewish tradition to the very heart of contemporary culture studies." * Steven Fine, Yeshiva University *

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Book SynopsisIf politics is about the state, can a stateless people be political? Until recently, scholars were fiercely divided regarding whether Jews engaged in politics, displayed political wisdom, or penned works of political thought over the two millennia when there was no Jewish state. But over the past few decades, the field of Jewish political thought has begun to examine the ways in which Jewish individuals and communal organizations behaved politically even in diaspora. The King Is in the Field centers writing from leading scholars that serves as an introduction to this exciting field, providing critical resources for anyone interested in thinking about politics both within and beyond the state. From kabbalistic theology to economic philanthropy, from race and nationalism in the U.S. to Israeli legal discourse and feminist activism, this key study of Jewish political thought holds the promise to reorient the field of political thought as a whole by expanding conceptions of what counts as “political.” In a world in which statelessness now applies to 100 million individuals, this volume illuminates ways to understand how diaspora Jewish political thought functioned in adopted homelands. This approach allows the book to offer questions and analysis that add depth and breadth to academic studies of Jewish politics while simultaneously offering a blueprint for future volumes interrogating political action through multiple diasporas. Contributors: Samuel Hayim Brody, Lihi Ben Shitrit, Julie E. Cooper, Arye Edrei, Meirav Jones, Rebecca Kobrin, Vincent Lloyd, Menachem Lorberbaum, Shaul Magid, Assaf Tamari, Irene Tucker, Philipp Von Wussow, Michael Walzer.Trade Review"The essays in this important volume develop a broad and diverse array of Jewish political thinking in the Jewish past and present. Anyone interested in modern Jewish politics, and indeed in modern Judaism, will learn much from this book." * Leora F. Batnitzky, author of How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought *

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Book SynopsisSpanning the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and theology, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge adopts a fresh approach to the study of Jewish thought and culture. By creatively foregrounding the role of emotions, senses, and the imagination in Jewish experience, the book invites readers to consider what it means for Jewish identity and experience to be constituted outside the frameworks of reasoned thought and inquiry. The collection’s eight essays offer innovative and provocative approaches to a diverse array of topics including modern Jewish-Christian relations, the book of Isaiah, contemporary Jewish fiction, and philosophical meditations on Jewish law. Their bold interpretations of Jewish texts and histories are centered on questions of faith, loss, prejudice, and enchantment—and the darker implications of these questions. The book’s essays also illuminate the importance of desire as a key motivating force in the pursuit of knowledge. Weaving together insights from several disciplines, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge challenges us to grapple with the unexpected, the unconventional, and the uncomfortable aspects of Jewish experience and its representations. Contributors: Anne C. Dailey, John Efron, Yael S. Feldman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Martin Kavka, Lital Levy, Shaul Magid, Eva Mroczek, Paul E. Nahme, Eli Schonfeld, Shira Stav.Trade Review"What happens when Jewish studies attends to desire—the longing embedded in the texts, the practices, the people, the communities we study but also the love that fuels the Jewish studies scholar’s own passionate critical engagement? What is unsettled here are both the ways of doing scholarship, and the strangely hopeful possibilities that being unsettled can produce." * Laura Levitt, author of The Objects That Remain *"This is a groundbreaking collection of essays. The first of its kind, this superb book will ‘unsettle’ its readers in profound ways, inspiring them to seek new modes of academic inquiry." * Ilana Pardes, author of Ruth: A Migrant’s Tale *

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Book SynopsisEnvisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, red-bearded Jewish warriors, bedecked in red attire who purportedly resided in isolation at the fringes of the known world, the Red Jews are a legendary people who populated a shared Jewish-Christian imagination. But in fact the red variant of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is a singular invention of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany. This idiosyncratic figure, together with the peculiar term “Red Jews,” existed solely in German and Yiddish, the German-Jewish vernacular. These two language communities assessed the Red Jews differently and contested their significance, which is to say, they viewed them in different shades of red. The voyage of the Red Jews through the Jewish and Christian imagination, from their medieval Christian nascence, through early modern Old Yiddish literature, to modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe, Palestine, and America, is the story of this book. By studying this vernacular icon, Rebekka Voß contributes to our understanding of the formation of minority awareness and the construction of Ashkenazic Jewish identity through visual cultural encounters. She also spotlights the vitality of vernacular culture by demonstrating how the premodern motif of the Red Jews informed modern Yiddish literature, and how the stereotype of Jewish red hair found its way into Jewish social critiques, political thought, and arts through the present day. Sons of Saviors is a story about power: the Yiddish reappropriation of the Red Jews subverted the Christian color symbolism by adjusting the focus on redness from a negative stereotype into a proud badge of self-assertion. The book also includes in an appendix the full text of a significant Yiddish tale featuring the Red Jews.

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Book SynopsisThe Hebrew word zimzum originally means “contraction,” “withdrawal,” “retreat,” “limitation,” and “concentration.” In Kabbalah, zimzum is a term for God’s self-limitation, done before creating the world to create the world. Jewish mystic Isaac Luria coined this term in Galilee in the sixteenth century, positing that the God who was “Ein-Sof,” unlimited and omnipresent before creation, must concentrate himself in the zimzum and withdraw in order to make room for the creation of the world in God’s own center. At the same time, God also limits his infinite omnipotence to allow the finite world to arise. Without the zimzum there is no creation, making zimzum one of the basic concepts of Judaism. The Lurianic doctrine of the zimzum has been considered an intellectual showpiece of the Kabbalah and of Jewish philosophy. The teaching of the zimzum has appeared in the Kabbalistic literature across Central and Eastern Europe, perhaps most famously in Hasidic literature up to the present day and in philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem’s epoch-making research on Jewish mysticism. The Zimzum has fascinated Jewish and Christian theologians, philosophers, and writers like no other Kabbalistic teaching. This can be seen across the philosophy and cultural history of the twentieth century as it gained prominence among such diverse authors and artists as Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harold Bloom, Barnett Newman, and Anselm Kiefer. This book follows the traces of the zimzum across the Jewish and Christian intellectual history of Europe and North America over more than four centuries, where Judaism and Christianity, theosophy and philosophy, divine and human, mysticism and literature, Kabbalah and the arts encounter, mix, and cross-fertilize the interpretations and appropriations of this doctrine of God’s self-entanglement and limitation.Trade Review"The shining translation by Corey Twitchell, working closely with the author, allows a vital work to have a new and expanded audience. Bravo! A book for every library—in Jewish studies and well beyond." * Sander L. Gilman, author of Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity *"Christoph Schulte’s Zimzum: God and the Origin of the World surveys the major interpretations of the notion of divine contraction in Jewish mysticism, in the developments triggered by its reverberations in German philosophy, and in modern scholarship." * Moshe Idel, Hebrew University, Jerusalem *"This brilliant book, tracing the origins and later transformations of the notion of zimzum—from Luria to contemporary arts—is a necessary read for all interested in the intellectual history of Western modernity." * Agata Bielik-Robson, University of Nottingham *

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Book SynopsisSince 2000, more than twenty countries around the world have held elections in which parties that espouse a political agenda based on an Islamic worldview have competed for legislative seats. Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World examines the impact these parties have had on the political process in two different areas of the world with large Muslim populations: the Middle East and Asia. The book's contributors examine major cases of Islamist party evolution and participation in democratic and semidemocratic systems in Turkey, Morocco, Yemen, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. Collectively they articulate a theoretical framework to understand the strategic behavior of Islamist parties, including the characteristics that distinguish them from other types of political parties, how they relate to other parties as potential competitors or collaborators, how ties to broader Islamist movements may affect party behavior in elections, and how participation in an electoral system can affect the behavior and ideology of an Islamist party over time. Through this framework, the contributors observe a general tendency in Islamist politics. Although Islamist parties represent diverse interests and behaviors that are tied to their particular domestic contexts, through repeated elections they often come to operate less as antiestablishment parties and more in line with the political norms of the regimes in which they compete. While a few parties have deliberately chosen to remain on the fringes of their political system, most have found significant political rewards in changing their messages and behavior to attract more centrist voters. As the impact of the Arab Spring continues to be felt, Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World offers a nuanced and timely perspective of Islamist politics in broader global context. Contributors: Wenling Chan, Julie Chernov Hwang, Joseph Chinyong Liow, Driss Maghraoui, Quinn Mecham, Ali Riaz, Murat Somer, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Saloua Zerhouni.Trade Review"[T]his pioneering volume, which is clear and accessible in both argument and style, should prove highly illuminating for students of Islamist and comparative politics, as well as for politicians and non-expert readers." * Political Studies Review *"A superb book that offers balanced, nuanced, evidence-based thoughtful analysis at both the case study and comparative levels." * R. William Liddle, Ohio State University *"This empirically rich and level-headed approach to Islamist politics combines a broad theoretical and analytical framework with deep knowledge of particular cases in and beyond the Arab world." * Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University *

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Book SynopsisThe United States is Israel's closest ally in the world. The fact is undeniable, and undeniably controversial, not least because it so often inspires conspiracy theorizing among those who refuse to believe that the special relationship serves America's strategic interests or places the United States on the side of Israel's enduring conflict with the Palestinians. Some point to the nefarious influence of a powerful "Israel lobby" within the halls of Congress. Others detect the hand of evangelical Protestants who fervently support Israel for their own theological reasons. The underlying assumption of all such accounts is that America's support for Israel must flow from a mixture of collusion, manipulation, and ideologically driven foolishness. Samuel Goldman proposes another explanation. The political culture of the United States, he argues, has been marked from the very beginning by a Christian theology that views the American nation as deeply implicated in the historical fate of biblical Israel. God's Country is the first book to tell the complete story of Christian Zionism in American political and religious thought from the Puritans to 9/11. It identifies three sources of American Christian support for a Jewish state: covenant, or the idea of an ongoing relationship between God and the Jewish people; prophecy, or biblical predictions of return to The Promised Land; and cultural affinity, based on shared values and similar institutions. Combining original research with insights from the work of historians of American religion, Goldman crafts a provocative narrative that chronicles Americans' attachment to the State of Israel.Trade Review"This study of the history of pro- and anti-Israel ideas among American Christians from the Colonial period to the present day challenges the stereotypes that often distort discussions of Christian Zionism and offers useful observations about one of the most important political forces in American life." * Foreign Affairs *"Significant and surprising. . . . [God's Country] not only traces the 200 years of scriptural interpretation and evangelical exhortation connecting Adams and Pence but also delves into 200 years of prior British Protestantism that shaped the outlook of the Revolutionary generation." * Commentary *"[A]n ambitious book . . . a highly readable overview of American Christian thought about Israel from the time of the Puritans to the modern period." * Journal of Church and State *"Goldman's book could not be more timely. If you want to understand how the Christian right, once known as anti-Semitic, can now be pro-Zionist, this is the book for you." * Alan Wolfe, Boston College *"God's Country tracks four centuries of a Bible-reading people's thoughts about the people of the Bible. Samuel Goldman tells a fascinating, surprising story." * Richard Brookhiser, author of Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln *"A serious and substantial contribution to U.S. intellectual history. Samuel Goldman's careful reading of the relationship between American Protestants and a biblically grounded Zionism not only provides expert understanding of the deeply religious foundation of American Exceptionalism but also forces a reconsideration of the intellectual terrain." * Raymond Haberski, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis *"Drawing from an extensive body of literature that spans several disciplines, Samuel Goldman's God's Country describes the religious and political phenomenon of American Christian Zionism in ways that are accessible to scholars, students, and general readers alike. The book is the best overview we have of this complex and timely topic." * Michael Lienesch, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *

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Book SynopsisPerhaps an unlikely subject for an ethnographic case study, the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto in Canada is a large predominantly LGBT church with a robust, and at times fraught, history of advocacy. While the church is often riddled with fault lines and contradictions, its queer and faith-based emphasis on shared vulnerability leads it to engage in radical solidarity with asylum-seekers, pointing to the work of affect in radical, coalition politics. A House of Prayer for All People maps the affective dimensions of the politics of citizenship at this church. For nearly three years, David K. Seitz regularly attended services at MCCT. He paid special attention to how community and citizenship are formed in a primarily queer Christian organization, focusing on four contemporary struggles: debates on race and gender in religious leadership, activism around police–minority relations, outreach to LGBT Christians transnationally, and advocacy for asylum seekers. Engaging in debates in cultural geography, queer of color critique, psychoanalysis, and affect theory, A House of Prayer for All People stages innovative, reparative encounters with citizenship and religion. Building on queer theory’s rich history of “subjectless” critique, Seitz calls for an “improper” queer citizenship—one that refuses liberal identity politics or national territory as the ethical horizon for sympathy, solidarity, rights, redistribution, or intimacy. Improper queer citizenship, he suggests, depends not only on “good politics” but also on people’s capacity for empathy, integration, and repair.Trade Review"A House of Prayer for All People complicates the common narrative about the seemingly natural and insurmountable divide between LGBT people and religion. Through an examination of the Metropolitan Community Church in Toronto and its Pastor, The Rev, Brent Hawkes, Seitz elegantly engages with questions of sexual orientation, race, gender, religion as they are intertwined with social justice activism and the nature of citizenship. Drawing his narrative across local, national and transnational sites, Seitz build a nuanced and complex conceptual framing in order to ‘repair’ religion and religious spaces for queer people. In doing so he strives to open a space for more capacious (yet precarious) possibilities beyond contemporary identity politics."—Catherine J. Nash, Brock University"David Seitz’s rendition of the politics of refuge within faith community in Toronto is challenging, insightful, empirically rich, and conceptually bold. Seitz offers ‘improper queer citizenship’ as a messy, unfinished political project. His analysis is essential reading that grows more pressing with each passing day."—Alison Mountz, author of Seeking Asylum "This a good book for bad times. It models a generous and nuanced mode of critique and thus will be excellent for teaching undergraduate and graduate students. It is critical without being debilitating, putting queer, psychoanalytic, antiracist and postcolonial theory to the service of practical politics and emancipatory aspirations. That these politics are messy is precisely Seitz’s point."—Geraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia "In this book, Seitz beautifully gets at the diffuse nature of power and makes a strong case for the need for constant vigilance and rethinking within queer politics and scholarship. He challenges the notion that there are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ queer objects and easily identifiable queer heroes and victims. Further, he traverses the historical and the contemporary in compelling ways, and weaves together an analysis that impressively crosses scales, taking the reader from the body and the building (of the church) to the nation and the globe in ways that give us a rich evocation of the problematics and promises of the city of Toronto. A House of Prayer for All People is, in short, a useful work of queer auto critique."—Natalie Oswin, McGill University "To take an intimate space of a church seriously as a site of social change requires an understanding of its limitations, in this case particularly with regards to racism and ethnocentrism; humility and playfulness in what we consider to be appropriate subjects within a queer radical frame; and openness to the surprising radical possibilities of unexpected places. I particularly enjoyed reading Seitz’s description of this life-affirming, though problematic, space."—Farhang Rouhani, University of Mary Washington"First-rate work . . . for far too long, the shadow of a puritanical, misunderstood, and ultimately false form of Christianity has overshadowed our scholarship in gender and sexuality studies. This book provides a helpful and eloquent correction."—Reading Religion"Seitz weaves together issues of citizenship, religion, queer identity and politics in an empirically rich, nuanced and complex study that will be of interest to queer scholars, migration scholars and those who refuse the notion that religion and sexuality must always be diametrically opposed."—Emotion, Space and Society"This book provides a solid description of activists who know the importance of recognizing and critiquing institutional and structural problems."—Mobilization"It is critical without being debilitating, putting queer, psychoanalytic, antiracist, and postcolonial theory in service of practical politics and emancipatory aspirations. That these politics are messy is precisely Seitz’s point."—Society and Space"Seitz’s major contribution to queer geographic literature in this book is not only his merging of geographic and queer theories, but also his willingness to dive into the realm of faith and spirituality... Few geographers are inclined to tackle faith, religion, and/or spirituality in their work beyond using spiritual affiliations as ethnographic descriptors. A House of Prayer for All People certainly takes on this call."—Antipode"A House of Prayer deserves to be taught widely across a range of classes from queer studies to religion/secularism and globalism, from comparative examinations of ethnography to religion and citizenship, from critical considerations of humanitarianism to courses on religion and media."—Religious Studies Review Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction. Repairing Bad Objects: Improper Citizenship in Queer Church 1. Too Diverse? Race, Gender, and Affect in Church2. Pastor–Diva–Citizen: Reverend Dr. Brent Hawkes, Homonormative Melancholia, and the Limits of Celebrity 3. “Why Are You Doing This?” Desiring Queer Global Citizenship4. From Identity to Precarity: Asylum, State Violence, and Alternative Horizons for Improper CitizenshipConclusion: Loving an Unfinished WorldAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHow apparently positive representations of Muslims in U.S. media cast Muslims as a racial population Portrayals of Muslims as the beneficiaries of liberal values have contributed to the racialization of Muslims as a risky population since the September 11 attacks. These discourses, which hold up some Muslims as worthy of tolerance or sympathy, reinforce an unstable good Muslim/bad Muslim binary where any Muslim might be moved from one side to the other. In Tolerance and Risk, Mitra Rastegar explores these discourses as a component of the racialization of Muslims—where Muslims are portrayed as a highly diverse population that nevertheless is seen to contain within it a threat that requires constant vigilance.Tolerance and Risk brings together several case studies to examine the interrelation of representations of Muslims abroad and in the United States. These include human-interest stories and opinion polls of Muslim Americans, media representations of education activist Malala Yousafzai, LGBTQ activist discourses, local New York controversies surrounding Muslim-led public projects, and social media discourses of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tolerance and Risk demonstrates how representations of tolerable or sympathetic Muslims produce them as a population with distinct characteristics, capacities, and risks, and circulate standards by which the trustworthiness or threat of individual Muslims must be assessed.Tolerance and Risk examines the ways that discourses of liberal rights, including feminist and LGBTQ rights discourses, are mobilized to racialize Muslims as uncivilized, even as they garner sympathy and identification with some Muslims. Trade Review"Through a brilliant analysis, Mitra Rastegar illuminates how the same standards that deem some Muslims worthy of tolerance can then be used against them. This is an urgently necessary book that will change our understanding of how inclusion operates in liberal societies."—Evelyn Alsultany, author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Tolerance and Anti-Muslim Racism1. News Stories, Police Profiles, and Opinion Polls: Muslims as a Population of Risk2. From Reading Lolita to Reading Malala: Sympathy and Empowering Muslim Women3. “Iran, Stop Killing Gays”: Queer Identifications and Secular Distinctions4.Defamed and Defended: The Precarity of the “Moderate” Muslim Americans5. “Muslims Worth Saving”: The Syrian Refugee Crisis and HumanitarianismConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisHow apparently positive representations of Muslims in U.S. media cast Muslims as a racial population Portrayals of Muslims as the beneficiaries of liberal values have contributed to the racialization of Muslims as a risky population since the September 11 attacks. These discourses, which hold up some Muslims as worthy of tolerance or sympathy, reinforce an unstable good Muslim/bad Muslim binary where any Muslim might be moved from one side to the other. In Tolerance and Risk, Mitra Rastegar explores these discourses as a component of the racialization of Muslims—where Muslims are portrayed as a highly diverse population that nevertheless is seen to contain within it a threat that requires constant vigilance.Tolerance and Risk brings together several case studies to examine the interrelation of representations of Muslims abroad and in the United States. These include human-interest stories and opinion polls of Muslim Americans, media representations of education activist Malala Yousafzai, LGBTQ activist discourses, local New York controversies surrounding Muslim-led public projects, and social media discourses of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tolerance and Risk demonstrates how representations of tolerable or sympathetic Muslims produce them as a population with distinct characteristics, capacities, and risks, and circulate standards by which the trustworthiness or threat of individual Muslims must be assessed.Tolerance and Risk examines the ways that discourses of liberal rights, including feminist and LGBTQ rights discourses, are mobilized to racialize Muslims as uncivilized, even as they garner sympathy and identification with some Muslims. Trade Review"Through a brilliant analysis, Mitra Rastegar illuminates how the same standards that deem some Muslims worthy of tolerance can then be used against them. This is an urgently necessary book that will change our understanding of how inclusion operates in liberal societies."—Evelyn Alsultany, author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Tolerance and Anti-Muslim Racism1. News Stories, Police Profiles, and Opinion Polls: Muslims as a Population of Risk2. From Reading Lolita to Reading Malala: Sympathy and Empowering Muslim Women3. “Iran, Stop Killing Gays”: Queer Identifications and Secular Distinctions4.Defamed and Defended: The Precarity of the “Moderate” Muslim Americans5. “Muslims Worth Saving”: The Syrian Refugee Crisis and HumanitarianismConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThe first major qualitative study of “countering violent extremism” in key U.S. cities Suspect Communities is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program that has arisen in major cities across the United States since 2011. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative study, it examines how the concept behind CVEaimed at combating homegrown terrorism by engaging Muslim community members, teachers, and religious leaders in monitoring and reporting on young peoplehas been operationalized through the everyday work of CVE actors, from high-level national security workers to local community members, with significant penalties for the communities themselves.Nicole Nguyen argues that studying CVE provides insight into how the drive to bring liberal reforms to contemporary security regimes through “community-driven” and “ideologically ecumenical” programming has in fact further institutionalized anti-Muslim racism in the United States. She forcefully contends that the U.S. security state has designed CVE to legitimize and shore up support for the very institutions that historically have criminalized, demonized, and dehumanized communities of color, while appearing to learn from and attenuate past practices of coercive policing, racial profiling, and political exclusion. By undertaking this analysis, Suspect Communities offers a vital window into the inner workings of the U.S. security state and the devastating impact of CVE on local communities. Trade Review"Suspect Communities is a detailed account of ‘countering violent extremism' policies within the United States, bringing together the current state of play and existing research in a well-rounded analysis. It will be useful for scholars and activists alike."—Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror"Nicole Nguyen’s innovative research reveals important nuances and context around the white supremacist racism embedded within so-called counterterrorism policy. She provides powerful critiques of ‘countering violent extremism’ programs, their precursors from the ‘War on Terror,’ and their successors in the ‘Muslim Ban’ era. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in counterterrorism policy."—Erik Love, author of Islamophobia and Racism in America

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Book SynopsisThe first major qualitative study of “countering violent extremism” in key U.S. cities Suspect Communities is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program that has arisen in major cities across the United States since 2011. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative study, it examines how the concept behind CVEaimed at combating homegrown terrorism by engaging Muslim community members, teachers, and religious leaders in monitoring and reporting on young peoplehas been operationalized through the everyday work of CVE actors, from high-level national security workers to local community members, with significant penalties for the communities themselves.Nicole Nguyen argues that studying CVE provides insight into how the drive to bring liberal reforms to contemporary security regimes through “community-driven” and “ideologically ecumenical” programming has in fact further institutionalized anti-Muslim racism in the United States. She forcefully contends that the U.S. security state has designed CVE to legitimize and shore up support for the very institutions that historically have criminalized, demonized, and dehumanized communities of color, while appearing to learn from and attenuate past practices of coercive policing, racial profiling, and political exclusion. By undertaking this analysis, Suspect Communities offers a vital window into the inner workings of the U.S. security state and the devastating impact of CVE on local communities. Trade Review"Suspect Communities is a detailed account of ‘countering violent extremism' policies within the United States, bringing together the current state of play and existing research in a well-rounded analysis. It will be useful for scholars and activists alike."—Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror"Nicole Nguyen’s innovative research reveals important nuances and context around the white supremacist racism embedded within so-called counterterrorism policy. She provides powerful critiques of ‘countering violent extremism’ programs, their precursors from the ‘War on Terror,’ and their successors in the ‘Muslim Ban’ era. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in counterterrorism policy."—Erik Love, author of Islamophobia and Racism in America

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Book SynopsisHow perceptions of Mormonism from 1830 to the present reveal the exclusionary, racialized practices of the U.S. nation-state Are Mormons really so weird? Are they potentially queer? These questions occupy the heart of this powerful rethinking of Mormonism and its place in U.S. history, culture, and politics. K. Mohrman argues that Mormon peculiarity is not inherent to the Latter-day Saint faith tradition, as is often assumed, but rather a potent expression of U.S. exceptionalism. Exceptionally Queer scrutinizes the history of Mormonism starting with its inception in the early 1830s and continuing to the present. Drawing on a wide range of historical texts and moments—from nineteenth-century battles over Mormon plural marriage; to the LDS Church’s emphases on “individual responsibility” and “family values”; to mainstream media’s coverage of the LDS Church’s racist exclusion of Black priesthood holders, its Native assimilation programs, and vehement opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment; and to much more recent legal and cultural battles over same-sex marriage and on-screen Mormon polygamy—Exceptionally Queer evaluates how Mormonism has been used to motivate and rationalize the biased, exclusionary, and colonialist policies and practices of the U.S. nation-state.Mohrman explains that debates over Mormonism both drew on and shaped racial discourses and, in so doing, delineated the boundaries of whiteness and national belonging, largely through the consolidation of (hetero)normative ideas of sex, marriage, family, and economy. Ultimately, the author shows how discussions of Mormonism in this country have been and continue to be central to ideas of what it means to be American. Trade Review "K. Mohrman upends normative, contemporary understandings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in relationship to race, queerness, and American nationalism. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, Exceptionally Queer traces how Mormon peculiarity is critical to understanding U.S. nationalism. Whether framed as marginal and a threat to all that America holds dear or being represented as hyper-American nationalists, Mohrman demonstrates that Mormonism is a critical part of the national imaginary and the political discourse that, due to its peculiarity, has not been fully explored until now."—Hōkūlani K. Aikau, author of A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai‘i "K. Mohrman’s Exceptionally Queer brings much-needed theorizing to the question of Mormon peculiarity. Often discussed as both strange and hypernormal, Latter-day Saints occupy a puzzling place in the American consciousness. The brilliant analysis in this book links Mormonism’s peculiarity and its Americanness to larger issues of American nationalism, imperialism, and racial formation. Scholars of U.S. history, race, sexuality, queer studies, and, of course, Mormonism have much to gain from the powerful lens this book casts on the project of American exceptionalism."—Taylor Petrey, author of Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism "Mohrman’s evidence and arguments are provocative, engaging, and expand the possibilites for Mormon studies to enter into broader interdisciplinary conversations. Exceptionally Queer cannot—and should not—be ignored. "—Juvenile Instructor Table of ContentsIntroduction: Peculiar, Exceptional, QueerPart I. Making Mormonism Peculiar1. Becoming Peculiar, 1830–18522. A Peculiar Race with Peculiar Institutions, 1847–18743. The Problems of (Mormon) Empire, 1874–1896Part II. Exceptionally Normal4. Resignifying Mormon Peculiarity, 1890–19455. A Thoroughly American Institution, 1936–19626. Making Mormon Peculiarity Colorblind, 1960–1982Part III. Regulatory Queer Varieties of Mormon Peculiarity7. Polygamy, or The Racial Politics of Marriage as FreedomCoda: What Mormonism Can Tell Us about Critical TheoryAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHow perceptions of Mormonism from 1830 to the present reveal the exclusionary, racialized practices of the U.S. nation-state Are Mormons really so weird? Are they potentially queer? These questions occupy the heart of this powerful rethinking of Mormonism and its place in U.S. history, culture, and politics. K. Mohrman argues that Mormon peculiarity is not inherent to the Latter-day Saint faith tradition, as is often assumed, but rather a potent expression of U.S. exceptionalism. Exceptionally Queer scrutinizes the history of Mormonism starting with its inception in the early 1830s and continuing to the present. Drawing on a wide range of historical texts and moments—from nineteenth-century battles over Mormon plural marriage; to the LDS Church’s emphases on “individual responsibility” and “family values”; to mainstream media’s coverage of the LDS Church’s racist exclusion of Black priesthood holders, its Native assimilation programs, and vehement opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment; and to much more recent legal and cultural battles over same-sex marriage and on-screen Mormon polygamy—Exceptionally Queer evaluates how Mormonism has been used to motivate and rationalize the biased, exclusionary, and colonialist policies and practices of the U.S. nation-state.Mohrman explains that debates over Mormonism both drew on and shaped racial discourses and, in so doing, delineated the boundaries of whiteness and national belonging, largely through the consolidation of (hetero)normative ideas of sex, marriage, family, and economy. Ultimately, the author shows how discussions of Mormonism in this country have been and continue to be central to ideas of what it means to be American. Trade Review "K. Mohrman upends normative, contemporary understandings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in relationship to race, queerness, and American nationalism. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, Exceptionally Queer traces how Mormon peculiarity is critical to understanding U.S. nationalism. Whether framed as marginal and a threat to all that America holds dear or being represented as hyper-American nationalists, Mohrman demonstrates that Mormonism is a critical part of the national imaginary and the political discourse that, due to its peculiarity, has not been fully explored until now."—Hōkūlani K. Aikau, author of A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai‘i "K. Mohrman’s Exceptionally Queer brings much-needed theorizing to the question of Mormon peculiarity. Often discussed as both strange and hypernormal, Latter-day Saints occupy a puzzling place in the American consciousness. The brilliant analysis in this book links Mormonism’s peculiarity and its Americanness to larger issues of American nationalism, imperialism, and racial formation. Scholars of U.S. history, race, sexuality, queer studies, and, of course, Mormonism have much to gain from the powerful lens this book casts on the project of American exceptionalism."—Taylor Petrey, author of Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism "Mohrman’s evidence and arguments are provocative, engaging, and expand the possibilites for Mormon studies to enter into broader interdisciplinary conversations. Exceptionally Queer cannot—and should not—be ignored. "—Juvenile Instructor Table of ContentsIntroduction: Peculiar, Exceptional, QueerPart I. Making Mormonism Peculiar1. Becoming Peculiar, 1830–18522. A Peculiar Race with Peculiar Institutions, 1847–18743. The Problems of (Mormon) Empire, 1874–1896Part II. Exceptionally Normal4. Resignifying Mormon Peculiarity, 1890–19455. A Thoroughly American Institution, 1936–19626. Making Mormon Peculiarity Colorblind, 1960–1982Part III. Regulatory Queer Varieties of Mormon Peculiarity7. Polygamy, or The Racial Politics of Marriage as FreedomCoda: What Mormonism Can Tell Us about Critical TheoryAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHow Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim in the post-9/11 world While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of law’s protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim. Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim women’s clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West. Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force. Trade Review"Boldly and elegantly, Sherene H. Razack lays bare the affective, legal, and material worlds that protect white supremacy and anti-Muslim racism. Theoretically rigorous while highly accessible, Nothing Has to Make Sense is one of the most urgent books on anti-Muslim racism of our times and a must read for anyone looking for an unflinching analysis of race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire."—Nadine Naber, University of Illinois Chicago"This is an essential text on race and racisms today, as well as the shifting language of white supremacy in Europe and North America, and their impact globally. We cannot understand the Global North without this timely and persuasive analysis of anti-Muslim affect as the link between Christianity, whiteness, and the colonial phantasms lurking in law and racial sciences. This is a crucial book for our times."—Inderpal Grewal, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Anti-Muslim Racism, Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Law1. “A New Phase of a Very Old War”: Islam and White Conservative Christian Aggrievement2. “I Can Never Tell If You’re Responding to My Smile”: Desiring Muslim Women3. “Terrorism in Their Genes”: Racial Science and the Muslim Terrorist4. “We Didn’t Kill ’em, We Didn’t Cut Their Heads Off”: Torture and the Making of American InnocenceConclusion: Arriving as MuslimAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisHow Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim in the post-9/11 world While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of law’s protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim. Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim women’s clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West. Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force. Trade Review"Boldly and elegantly, Sherene H. Razack lays bare the affective, legal, and material worlds that protect white supremacy and anti-Muslim racism. Theoretically rigorous while highly accessible, Nothing Has to Make Sense is one of the most urgent books on anti-Muslim racism of our times and a must read for anyone looking for an unflinching analysis of race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire."—Nadine Naber, University of Illinois Chicago"This is an essential text on race and racisms today, as well as the shifting language of white supremacy in Europe and North America, and their impact globally. We cannot understand the Global North without this timely and persuasive analysis of anti-Muslim affect as the link between Christianity, whiteness, and the colonial phantasms lurking in law and racial sciences. This is a crucial book for our times."—Inderpal Grewal, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Anti-Muslim Racism, Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Law1. “A New Phase of a Very Old War”: Islam and White Conservative Christian Aggrievement2. “I Can Never Tell If You’re Responding to My Smile”: Desiring Muslim Women3. “Terrorism in Their Genes”: Racial Science and the Muslim Terrorist4. “We Didn’t Kill ’em, We Didn’t Cut Their Heads Off”: Torture and the Making of American InnocenceConclusion: Arriving as MuslimAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThis thought-provoking collection offers a multi-disciplinary approach on the subject of humour, Muslims, and Islam. Beginning with theoretical perspectives and scriptural guidance on permissible and restricted humour, the volume presents a variety of case studies about Muslim comedic practices in various cultural, political, and religious contexts. This unprecedented scholarship sheds new light on common misconceptions about humour and laughter in Islam and deftly tackles sensitive themes from blasphemy to freedom of speech. Chapter 9 is available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.Table of ContentsIntroduction - Bernard Schweizer and Lina Molokotos-Liederman PART I Theoretical Perspectives on Islam and Humour 1 Ridicule in the Qur’an: The Missing Link in Islamic Humour Studies - Mostafa Abedinifard 2 Laughter in the Discursive Tradition? Emotions of Muḥammad as the Topic of a Pious Arabic-English Reader - Georg Leube 3 Humour in Islamic Literature and Muslim Practices: Virtue or Vice? - Walid Ghali PART II Muslim Humour Practices in Islamicate Societies: Textual Media 4 Using/Abusing the Qur’an in Jocular Literature: Blasphemy, Qur’anophilia, or Familiarity? - Yasmin Amin 5 A 'Stupid Lur' Mocks Allah and Mullah: Sociocultural Implications of the Luri Jokes Cycle - Fatemeh Nasr Esfahani PART III Muslim Humour Practices in Islamicate Societies: Visual Media and Performance 6 Al- Bernameg: How Bassem Youssef Ridiculed Religious Fundamentalists and Survived the ‘Defamation of Religion’ Charge - Moutaz Alkheder 7 Arab Cartoonists and Religion: The Interdependence of Transgression and Taboo - Chourouq Nasri 8 Hizbullah’s Humour: Political Satire, Comedy, and Revolutionary Theatre - Joseph Alagha 9 ‘Putting the Fun Back into Fundamentalism’: Toying with Islam and Extremism in Comedy - Mona Abdel-Fadil PART IV Muslim Comedy in North America 10 Queering Islam in Performance: Gender and Sexuality in American Muslim Women’s Stand-up Comedy - Jaclyn A. Michael 11 Comedy as Social Commentary in Little Mosque on the Prairie: Decoding Humour in the First ‘Muslim Sitcom’ - Jay Friesen Conclusion - Bernard Schweizer and Lina Molokotos-Liederman Bibliography on Islam and Humour

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Book SynopsisAt last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York’s Lower East Side. Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore—all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America’s leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Her book The Ghetto and Other Poems, is a key work of American modernism, yet it has long, and unjustly, been neglected. When it was first published in 1918—in an abbreviated version in The New Republic, then in full by B. W. Huebsch five months later—The Ghetto and Other Poems was a literary sensation. The poet Alfred Kreymbourg, in a Poetry Magazine review, praised “The Ghetto” for its “sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness, and incisiveness of epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of pushcarts—the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm.” Louis Untermeyer, writing in The New York Evening Post, found “The Ghetto” “at once personal in its piercing sympathy and epical in its sweep. It is studded with images that are surprising and yet never strained or irrelevant; it glows with a color that is barbaric, exotic, and as local as Grand Street.” The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. The subsequent section, “Manhattan Lights,” delves further into city life and immigrant experience, illuminating life in the Bowery. Other poems stem from Ridge’s lifelong support of the American labor movement, and from her own experience as an immigrant. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and in particular the title poem, lost after Ridge’s death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity. Expertly edited and annotated by Lawrence Kramer, this first modern edition to reproduce the full 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Stories offers all the background and context needed for a rich, informed reading of Lola Ridge’s masterpiece.Table of ContentsIntroduction | xi The Ghetto To the American People | 3 The Ghetto | 5 Manhattan Lights Manhattan | 35 Broadway | 37 Flotsam | 39 Spring | 43 Bowery Afternoon | 45 Promenade | 46 The Fog | 48 Faces | 49 Labor Debris | 55 Dedication | 56 The Song of Iron | 57 Frank Little at Calvary | 63 Spires | 68 The Legion of Iron | 69 Fuel | 71 A Toast | 72 Accidentals “The Everlasting Return” | 77 Palestine | 81 The Song | 82 To the Others | 83 Babel | 84 The Fiddler | 85 Dawn Wind | 86 North Wind | 88 The Destroyer | 89 Lullaby | 90 The Foundling | 92 The Woman with Jewels | 93 Submerged | 95 Art and Life | 96 Brooklyn Bridge | 97 Dreams | 98 The Fire | 99 A Memory | 100 The Edge | 101 The Garden | 103 Under-Song | 105 A Worn Rose | 107 Iron Wine | 108 Dispossessed | 109 The Star | 111 The Tidings | 112 Appendix: The New Republic Version of “The Ghetto” | 115 References | 133

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Book SynopsisAt last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York’s Lower East Side. Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore—all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America’s leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Her book The Ghetto and Other Poems, is a key work of American modernism, yet it has long, and unjustly, been neglected. When it was first published in 1918—in an abbreviated version in The New Republic, then in full by B. W. Huebsch five months later—The Ghetto and Other Poems was a literary sensation. The poet Alfred Kreymbourg, in a Poetry Magazine review, praised “The Ghetto” for its “sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness, and incisiveness of epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of pushcarts—the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm.” Louis Untermeyer, writing in The New York Evening Post, found “The Ghetto” “at once personal in its piercing sympathy and epical in its sweep. It is studded with images that are surprising and yet never strained or irrelevant; it glows with a color that is barbaric, exotic, and as local as Grand Street.” The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. The subsequent section, “Manhattan Lights,” delves further into city life and immigrant experience, illuminating life in the Bowery. Other poems stem from Ridge’s lifelong support of the American labor movement, and from her own experience as an immigrant. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and in particular the title poem, lost after Ridge’s death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity. Expertly edited and annotated by Lawrence Kramer, this first modern edition to reproduce the full 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Stories offers all the background and context needed for a rich, informed reading of Lola Ridge’s masterpiece.Table of ContentsIntroduction | xi The Ghetto To the American People | 3 The Ghetto | 5 Manhattan Lights Manhattan | 35 Broadway | 37 Flotsam | 39 Spring | 43 Bowery Afternoon | 45 Promenade | 46 The Fog | 48 Faces | 49 Labor Debris | 55 Dedication | 56 The Song of Iron | 57 Frank Little at Calvary | 63 Spires | 68 The Legion of Iron | 69 Fuel | 71 A Toast | 72 Accidentals “The Everlasting Return” | 77 Palestine | 81 The Song | 82 To the Others | 83 Babel | 84 The Fiddler | 85 Dawn Wind | 86 North Wind | 88 The Destroyer | 89 Lullaby | 90 The Foundling | 92 The Woman with Jewels | 93 Submerged | 95 Art and Life | 96 Brooklyn Bridge | 97 Dreams | 98 The Fire | 99 A Memory | 100 The Edge | 101 The Garden | 103 Under-Song | 105 A Worn Rose | 107 Iron Wine | 108 Dispossessed | 109 The Star | 111 The Tidings | 112 Appendix: The New Republic Version of “The Ghetto” | 115 References | 133

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Book SynopsisThis original new work is the fascinating result of sociologist and documentary filmmaker Agnès De Féo’s ten-year exploration of the phenomenon of niqab wearing. It is at once a groundbreaking study and a series of compelling first-person accounts from French and Francophone women who wear or have worn the niqab in France’s Salafi communities. With the backdrop of the French government’s 2010 ban on full facial veiling in public spaces, which itself has shaped the phenomenon, De Féo draws on her subjects’ own words to show their agency, working against the clichés that often underlie public views of the niqab—that it is purely the result of masculine pressure, for example, or extreme religiosity or nationalism, or the submissive desire to disappear. Instead, she shows, the niqab is multivalent: women wear it for reasons that range from religious piety to the desire to rebel against mainstream society, family, or the rule of law. The reasons are complex, overdetermined, contradictory, or even inconsistent, but they are the women’s own. Despite being worn only by a small minority of Muslim women, the Islamic garment has nonetheless been a major source of intense political, religious, and cultural debate in France. Searching to understand, rather than speculate, De Féo chose to approach the people who wear the niqab, and to make them, rather the veil itself, the subject of her research. Her unprecedented study, based on more than 200 interviews, reveals the many factors—social, political, geopolitical, and psychological—underpinning a personal choice that is not always as religious as it seems. The book ends with sixteen captivating interviews giving voice to stories rarely heard. With finesse and discernment, the author debunks the myths surrounding the wearing of the niqab, and sheds light on a practice subject to misunderstanding and prejudice, offering the reader unique insight. Challenging our preconceived notions and stereotypes about women who wear any form of Islamic apparel, but particularly the niqab, The Niqab in France introduces a group of women each with her own life story, her own share of personal struggles, aspirations, and desires, and her own claim to a certain place in society. This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine.Table of ContentsPreface to the English-Language Edition | vii A Note on Terminology | xi PART I Introduction | 3 The Sociology of Niqab Wearers | 17 The Niqab and the Other | 35 A Reaction to the Ban | 49 Conclusion | 65 PART II 16 Portraits of Women Wearing the Niqab | 71 Earlier Wearers (Before 2009), | 71 Neo-Niqab Wearers (After 2009), | 101 The Niqab: Refuting Common Ideas | 155 Acknowledgments | 163 Notes | 165 Selected Bibliography and Filmography | 171

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Book SynopsisAn illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought the revelation of God. In the Afghan highlands of the sixteenth century, the messianic community known as the Roshaniyya not only desired to find God’s word and to abide by it but also attempted to practice God’s word and to develop techniques of language intended to render their own tongues as the organs of continuous revelation. As their critics would contend, however, the Roshaniyya attempted to make language do something that language should not do—infuse the semiotic with the divine. Their story thus ends in a tower of skulls, the proliferation of heresiographies that detailed the sins of the Roshaniyya, and new formations of “Afghan” identity. In Singing with the Mountains, William E. B. Sherman finds something extraordinary about the Roshaniyya, not least because the first known literary use of vernacular Pashto occurs in an eclectic, Roshani imitation of the Qur’an. The story of the Roshaniyya exemplifies a religious culture of linguistic experimentation. In the example of the Roshaniyya, we discover a set of questions and anxieties about the capacities of language that pervaded Sufi orders, imperial courts, groups of wandering ascetics, and scholastic networks throughout Central and South Asia. In telling this tale, Sherman asks the following questions: How can we make language shimmer with divine truth? How can letters grant sovereign power and form new “ethnic” identities and ways of belonging? How can rhyme bend our conceptions of time so that the prophetic past comes to inhabit the now of our collective moment? By analyzing the ways in which the Roshaniyya answered these types of questions—and the ways in which their answers were eventually rejected as heresies—this book offers new insight into the imaginations of religious actors in the late medieval and early modern Persianate worlds.Table of ContentsPreface: First Words | vii Acknowledgments | xi Mountains and Messiahs: An Introduction | 1 1 Bayazid’s Doubles: Hagiography and History in the Messianic Community | 29 2 The Dhikr of the Wretch: Text, Practice, and the Roshani Self | 62 3 Revelation through Repetition: The Roshaniyya Write the Word of God | 90 4 Vernacular Apocalypse: Poetic and Polemical Emergences of Pashto Literature | 118 5 The Vanguard of Disbelief: Afghan Ethnicity and Temporality after the Roshaniyya | 151 Ishmael’s Daydream: A Conclusion | 180 A Note on Sources | 189 Notes | 193 Bibliography | 227 Index | 253

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Book SynopsisAn illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought the revelation of God. In the Afghan highlands of the sixteenth century, the messianic community known as the Roshaniyya not only desired to find God’s word and to abide by it but also attempted to practice God’s word and to develop techniques of language intended to render their own tongues as the organs of continuous revelation. As their critics would contend, however, the Roshaniyya attempted to make language do something that language should not do—infuse the semiotic with the divine. Their story thus ends in a tower of skulls, the proliferation of heresiographies that detailed the sins of the Roshaniyya, and new formations of “Afghan” identity. In Singing with the Mountains, William E. B. Sherman finds something extraordinary about the Roshaniyya, not least because the first known literary use of vernacular Pashto occurs in an eclectic, Roshani imitation of the Qur’an. The story of the Roshaniyya exemplifies a religious culture of linguistic experimentation. In the example of the Roshaniyya, we discover a set of questions and anxieties about the capacities of language that pervaded Sufi orders, imperial courts, groups of wandering ascetics, and scholastic networks throughout Central and South Asia. In telling this tale, Sherman asks the following questions: How can we make language shimmer with divine truth? How can letters grant sovereign power and form new “ethnic” identities and ways of belonging? How can rhyme bend our conceptions of time so that the prophetic past comes to inhabit the now of our collective moment? By analyzing the ways in which the Roshaniyya answered these types of questions—and the ways in which their answers were eventually rejected as heresies—this book offers new insight into the imaginations of religious actors in the late medieval and early modern Persianate worlds.Table of ContentsPreface: First Words | vii Acknowledgments | xi Mountains and Messiahs: An Introduction | 1 1 Bayazid’s Doubles: Hagiography and History in the Messianic Community | 29 2 The Dhikr of the Wretch: Text, Practice, and the Roshani Self | 62 3 Revelation through Repetition: The Roshaniyya Write the Word of God | 90 4 Vernacular Apocalypse: Poetic and Polemical Emergences of Pashto Literature | 118 5 The Vanguard of Disbelief: Afghan Ethnicity and Temporality after the Roshaniyya | 151 Ishmael’s Daydream: A Conclusion | 180 A Note on Sources | 189 Notes | 193 Bibliography | 227 Index | 253

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Book SynopsisA Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) Tannhäuser played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyzes how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism. Readers will see how Tannhäuser evolves from a medieval knight to Peretz's pious Jewish scholar in the Land of Israel. The book also discusses how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was so inspired by Wagner's opera that he wrote The Jewish State while attending performances of it. A Knight at the Opera uses Tannhäuser as a way to examine the changing relationship between Jews and the broader world during the advent of the modern era, and to question if any art, even that of a prominent anti-Semite, should be considered taboo.

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Book SynopsisThis volume presents papers delivered at the 24th Annual Klutznick Harris Symposium, held at Creighton University in October 2011. The contributors look at all aspects of the intimate relationship between Jews and clothing, through case studies from ancient, medieval, recent, and contemporary history. Papers explore topics ranging from Jewish leadership in the textile industry, through the art of fashion in nineteenth-century Vienna, to the use of clothing as a badge of ethnic identity, in both secular and religious contexts.Table of Contents Contents: Shmattas in the North, Shmattas in the South: The Civil War and the Birth of the American Clothing Industry (Adam Mendelsohn) Weimar Jewish Chic from Wigs to Furs: Jewish Women and Fashion in 1920s Germany (Kerry Wallach) Jewish Photographers and the Body in the Weimar Republic (Nils Roemer) Female Tallitot: Creating American Jewish Women’s Religious Experience through Fashion (Rachel Gordan) Clothes and the Weaving of American Jewish Comedy (Ted Merwin) The Jewish Badge in Renaissance Italy: The Iconic O, the Yellow Hat, and the Paradoxes of Distinctive Sign Legislation (Flora Cassen) How a Rabbi Should Be Dressed: The Question of Cassock and Clerical Clothing among Italian Rabbis from the Renaissance to Contemporary Times (Asher Salah) The “Disinherited” Priesthood: A Look into Biblical Israel’s Unshod Priest (Christine Palmer) Costume and Identity in the Dura Europos Synagogue Paintings (Steven Fine) < Picturing Vienna’s New Woman: Madame d’Ora meets Ella Zwieback-Zirner (Lisa Silverman) Aboriginal Yarmulkes, Ambivalent Attire, and Ironies of Contemporary Jewish Identity (Eric Silverman) Fashioning Jews on the Screen: The Impact of Dress on Crafting the Jewish Image in Film and Television (Brian Amkraut)

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Book SynopsisAuthor of more than thirteen books and several volumes of poetry, screenwriter, and director, Edith Bruck is one of the leading literary voices in Italy, attracting increasing attention in the English-speaking world not least for her powerful Holocaust testimony, which is often compared with the work of her contemporaries Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani. Born in Hungary in 1932, she was deported with her family to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Christianstadt, Landsberg, and Bergen-Belsen, where she lost both her parents and a brother. After the war, she traveled widely until 1954 when she settled in Rome. She has lived there ever since. This important new study is motivated by a desire to better understand and situate Bruck's art as well as to advance (and, when necessary, to revise) the critical discourse on her considerable and eclectic body of work. As such, it underscores and analyzes the intermedial nature of her contributions to contemporary Italian culture, which should no longer be understood merely in terms of her willingness to revisit the subject of the Holocaust on the printed page or the silver screen. It also includes previously unpublished interviews with the author. The book will be of broad interest to scholars and students of Jewish (especially Holocaust) studies, Italian literature, film studies, women's studies, and postcolonial culture."This is the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the work produced by a main contemporary author of Italian Holocaust literature, focused on Bruck's overall artistic production (novels, poetry, film, and TV productions). It will offer scholars and students alike a new interpretive perspective and a valuable source of reference for their studies." Gabriella Romani, Seton Hall University.

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Book SynopsisZalkind Hourwitz lived during one of the most pivotal periods in history. A Polish Jew born in 1752, Hourwitz moved to France in 1774 and entered the intellectual and political life of ancien régime Paris. Frances Malino provides a vivid description of this compelling and exotic figure who fits none of the traditional portraits of eighteenth-century Jews. An investigation of his experiences in the French capital during this period challenges our previous understanding of Jewish emancipation, provides an additional perspective on revolutionary Paris (from that of both Jew and foreigner) and adds another dimension to the historiography of the French Revolution.Trade Review"Malino's book is a splendid piece of work, well-researched and richly annotated." American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction. 1. Political Beginnings. 2. The Apologies des Juifs. 3. A Revolutionary Jewish Voice. 4. The Frustrations of Emancipation. 5. Revolutionary Illusions. 6. A Would-Be Ideologue. 7. In Retreat. Conclusion.

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Book SynopsisThis book provides an introduction to Judaism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for all students of Judaism and world religions, and covers major movements that have been developed. Written by a leading teacher and researcher, each chapter features a clear and authoritative introduction to its subject, accompanied by a reading by a specialist in the particlular field.Trade Review"This volume, however, is superb.....this volume is sufficiently thought-provoking to be on every Jewish studies student's table." Times Educational Supplement "Neusner's new book is a pleasure to read. The reader can enjoy observing a penetrating analytical mind at work on the phenomena of modern judaism, developing a way of looking at its historical and social problems that will make sense to the beginning student, even if he or she is not Jewish, and still have validity for the seasoned historian of religion and culture." William Nichols, Judaism "It is certainly an important book which should be debated and become required reading for students of contemporary Judaism." Graham Harvey, Reviews in Religion and TheologyTable of ContentsAcknowledgements. Letter to the Student. Introduction: What do we mean by "Judaism" And By "Modern Times"?.Part I: The Nineteenth Century: .1. The Challenge of the Secular Age: Segregation or Integration and Three Integrationist Judaisms.2. Reform Judaism.3. Orthodox Judaism.4. Conservative Judaism.Part II: The Twentieth Century:. 5. The Challenge of the "Post-Christian" Century and the Response of Three "Post-Christian" Judaisms. 6. Zionism.7. Jewish Socialism and Yiddishism.8. American Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption. Epilogue.9. What do we learn about religion from Judaism in Modern Times?.Index.

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Book SynopsisA century ago, New Yorkers, hungry for mountain air, good food, and a Jewish environment combined with an American way of leisure, began to develop a resort area unique in the world. By the 1950s, this summer Eden of bungalow colonies, summer camps, and over 900 hotels had attracted over a million people a year. This was the Jewish Catskills of Sullivan and Ulster Counties. Born to a small hotel-owning family who worked for decades in hotels after losing their own, Phil Brown tells a story of the many elements of this magical environment. His own waiter's tales, his mother's culinary exploits as a chef, and his father's jobs as maitre d' and coffee shop operator offer a backdrop to the vital life of Catskills summers. Catskill Culture recounts the life of guests, staff, resort owners,entertainers, and local residents through the author's memories and archival research and the memories of 120 others. The Catskills resorts shaped American Jewish culture, enabling Jews to become more American while at the same time introducing the American public to immigrant Jewish culture. Catskills entertainment provided the nation with a rich supply of comedians, musicians, and singers. Legions of young men and women used the Catskills as a springboard to successful careers and marriages. A decline for the resort area beginning in the 1970s has led to many changes. Today most of the hotels and bungalow colonies are gone or in ruins, while other communities, notably those of the Hasidim, have appeared. The author includes an appendix listing over 900 hotels he has been able to document and invites readers to contact him with additional entries.Trade Review"With an insider's love and knowledge and a sociologist's objectivity, Phil Brown has written a book that avoids the sentimentality and condescension that have marred many of its predecessors. Interviews with former employees, owners and guests provide priceless insights into the culture of the Mountains. Brown's own voice is so warm, rich and good natured you will feel as if you are in the care of the most gracious of hosts as you experience life at the great-and not so great-Jewish resorts of the past." -Eileen Pollack, Director of Creative Writing, University of Michigan, and author of The Rabbi in the Attic and Other Stories "A powerful blend of personal memoir, sociological study, and historical ethnography, Catskill Culture recalls the life of Jewish Catskill mountain resort culture from its early years before World War II through its heyday in the postwar era and its subsequent decline in recent decades. Phil Brown's engaging and eminently readable account is shot through with nostalgic ambivalence for the world of work that produced the leisure industry known as 'the borscht belt'... An insightful exploration of the workplace culture of the Catskills resorts, the book speaks to all who have ever visited the mountains or heard stories about them as well as to students of contemporary ethnicity and culture." -Deborah Dash Moore, Professor of Religion, Vassar College, and author of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. "With part autobiography, part ethnography, Brown takes us back, nostalgically, to the halcyon days of this resort community. Remarkably, he depicts the area with such vivid illustrations that he brings alive the emotions, sentiments, and good will for which the Catskills were known. A labor of love...Mazel Tov, Phil!" -Contemporary Sociology "Using photographs and interviews, [Brown] takes a nostalgic look at the Borscht Belt and its decline...A pleasant read." -Library Journal "Because of his fond experience, Brown's ethnography is much warmer, more personal than most. It is a documentary of assimilation and a return to one's roots." -Publishers Weekly "One of the virtues of Phil Brown's unapologetically nostalgic memoir of growing up and working in the legendary Catskill Mountains-as busboy, cook, waiter, musician and all around 'mountain rat'-is that his particular nostalgia is profoundly earned. Indeed, he is deeply in touch with the vanished Jewish world of his parents who labored for their entire lives in the mountains. Brown offers an insider's-a native ethnographer's-account of this region and the astonishing Jewish culture it spawned." -American Jewish History "Whether you remember the summers in the Catskills, or heard nostalgic tales about this bygone era, this book is worth reading." -Lifestyles Magazine in Buffalo, NY "Part memoir, part history, part sociology: Catskill Culture is basically an engagingly-written jog down Memory Lane augmented by anecdotes..." -The Journal of American Ethnic HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Returning to the Catskills 2. How the Jewish Catskills Started 3. Kuchalayns and Bungalow Colonies 4. Hotel Life 5. Entertainment 6. "Mountain Rats": The More Skilled Workers and Other Veterans 7. Young Workers: Waiters, Busboys, Counselors, Bellhops, and Others 8. Guests 9. Resort Religion and Yiddishkeit 10. Decline, Present, and Future 11. What Made It So Special? Appendix: Hotels of the Catskills Notes Bibliography Index Photographs

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Book SynopsisA sobering critique of the renowned Jewish writer and philosopher WieselTrade Review"Mark Chmiel offers a bold and much-needed analysis of the moral pretensions of one of our country's most prominent public intellectuals. His thoughtful and measured examination of Elie Wiesel's ideas and actions reaches beyond the subject of this book into the heart of what is moral behavior in a troubled world." --Howard Zinn "In this courageous book, Mark Chmiel details the ambiguity of Elie Wiesel's moral witness. On the one hand, he has been a powerful voice calling the Western world to account for the Holocaust and intervening in other social tragedies. On the other hand, he has been consistently unwilling to respond to the plight of the Palestinians, victims of the Jewish state. In conclusion Chmiel calls those concerned with a consistent moral witness today to pay particular attention to the politically disregarded victims, whose victimization exposes the imperialism of the dominant powers." --Rosemary Radford Ruether, author of Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family "Chmiel offers the first serious critique of this modern-day Jewish prophet's life and work." --Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments 1. The Jewish Remembrancer: A Political Reading Themes of a Life The Political Economy of Worthy and Unworthy Victims 2. The Impassioned Advocate: Jewish Solidarity Respecting the Dead Defending the Survivors Mobilizing for Russian Jewry 3. The Cosmopolitan Witness: Global Solidarity A Final Solution in Paraguay Southeast Asian Refugees Central America in the 1980s 4. The Diaspora Apologist: Israel and the Fate of Palestine The Mystical Triumph of 1967 Confrontations and Disputations From the 1982 Lebanon Invasion to the "Peace Process" 5. The Worthy Victim: Moral Authority and State Power The Carter Administration and Sacred Memory The Reagan Years Bosnia, Kosovo, and Clinton 6. The Unfinished Project of Solidarity: If We Remain Silent Dangerous Remembrance From Bystanders to Resisters A Preferential Option for Unworthy Victims Notes Index

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Book SynopsisFresh articles about a much neglected genre, fiction from and about the Jewish ghetto. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries ghetto fiction played an important part in the expression of a particularly German-Jewish quest for identity. The volume Ghetto Writing takes the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Leopold Kompert's collection of ghetto stories Aus dem Ghetto (1848) to fill a gap and give testimony to an important genre that has been unduly silenced in the literary histories of the post-war period. The volume presents some 15 articles by scholars from Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, and Ireland whose contributions offer new analyses of ghetto writing by well known authors such as Heinrich Heine and Joseph Roth, andcompletely new material on forgotten ghetto writers who deserve to be rediscovered, such as Alexander Granach. The articles cover various types of ghetto writing, ranging from ghetto fiction in the tradition of Leopold Kompert and Karl Emil Franzos, to diaries, travelogues, autobiography, and even contemporary German HipHop and Rap lyrics.Trade ReviewA scintillating glimpse of a literary treasure trove.' CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS 'Should be of much use to those who study or teach German-Jewish literary and cultural relations.' GERMAN QUARTERLY ' The publication is of interest as in introduction into the material not only for the Germanist but also for the layperson.' ASCHKENAS 'The great breadth of this collection of essays makes it especially valuable.' GERMANISTIK 'This volume is bound to be of great interest to anyone interested in the works that chronicle the journey of the Yiddish speakers of Central and Eastern Europe from medieval ghettos to the attempted assimilation into the German cultural world. * SHOFAR *Table of ContentsThe Frankfurt Judengasse in Eyewitness Accounts from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century - Eoin Bourke Enlightened and Romantic Views of the Ghetto: David Frieländer versus Heinrich Heine - Ritchie Robertson Reclaiming the Location: Leopold Kompert's Ghetto Fiction in Post-Colonial Perspective - Florian Krobb German Versus Jargon: Language and Jewish Identity in German Ghetto Writing - Gabriele Glasenapp Eastern Jews and the Sociology of Nationalism - Chris Thornhill Pogroms in Literary Representation - Joachim Beug Philo-Simetic Tendencies in Wilhelm Jensen's Historical Novel Die Juden von Cölln - Joerg Thunecke Views from fin-de-Siécle Vienna: Zionist Images of Eastern Jews in Herzl's Die Welt - Paul E. Kerry The Construction of the Eastern Jewry in Joseph Roth's Juden auf Wanderschaft - David Horrocks From Ghetto to Nation: Hofmannsthal's Poetics of Assimilation - Michael Kane Persecution, Exile, and the Mental Ghetto in Henry William Katz's Novel Die Fischmanns - Ena Pedersen The Shtetl's Curiosity and Style: Alexander Granach's Autobiographical Novel Da ghet ein Mensch - Michael Schmidt Edgar Hilsenrath's Poetics of Insignificance and the Tradition of Humour in German-Jewish Ghetto Writing - Anne Fuchs "Beyond the Jewish Ghetto: The Ghetto in Modern Punk and Rap Culture" by Frank Möbus and Martin B. Münch

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Book SynopsisFeatures a special section on the Hungarian German Jewish writer and theater director George Tabori and a Forum section on the 2016 film A German Life. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 4 features a special section on the Hungarian German Jewish writer and theater director George Tabori; edited by Martin Kagel, this section includes both new documentary material and a number of trenchant scholarly articles. Additionally, the volume includes a Forum section (edited by Brad Prager) on the 2016 documentary film A German Life, an exploration of Kafka and childhood (Ritchie Robertson), and a provocative reassessment of Schindler's List (Eva Revesz). Contributors: Tobias Boes, Antje Diedrich, Norbert Otto Eke, Martin Kagel, Jennifer M. Kapczynski, Brad Prager, Eva Revesz, Ritchie Robertson, Robert Skloot, Kerstin Steitz, Donna Stonecipher, Lena Tabori, StanleyWalden, Valerie Weinstein. William Collins Donahue is the John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, where he chairs the Department of German and Russian. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Special section editor Martin Kagel is A. G. Steer Professor of German at the University of Georgia.Table of ContentsIntroduction - William Collins Donahue and Martha B. Helfer Kafka, Childhood, and History - Ritchie Robertson The Black, White, and Gray Zones of Schindler's List: Steven Spielberg with Primo Levi - Eva Revesz NEXUS FORUM on A GERMAN LIFE Perspectives on A German Life - Brad Prager No False Remorse: A Workshop with Florian Weigensamer, Director of A German Life (2016) Only Skin Deep - Tobias Boes A Brunhilde for Our Time: Eliding the Questions in A German Life - William Collins Donahue Hitler's Helpmates - Jennifer M. Kapczynski Zooming in on Moral Guilt: A German Life as an Artistic Public Trial - Kerstin Steitz Framing the Beldame in A German Life and Blind Spot - Valerie Weinstein SPECIAL SECTION on GEORGE TABORI Introduction - Martin Kagel Waiting for The Cannibals: George Tabori's Post-Holocaust Play - William Collins Donahue "Sacrifice is the test for loyalty, Goldberg." Sacrifice and the Passion of Christ in George Tabori's Comedy The Goldberg-Variations - Norbert Otto Eke "Empathy for the Entire Spectrum of Selves and Others": George Tabori's Humanism - Antje Diedrich A Triple Act of Translation: George Tabori and Brecht on Brecht - Donna Stonecipher My War Story: Tabori, Brecht, and Vietnam - Robert Skloot My Life with George - Lena Tabori Some Observations by an American Acting in the German Theater (1984) - Stanley Walden

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Book SynopsisNew essays from the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, the first and only ongoing forum for German Jewish Studies in North America. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University, the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. It publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies and serves as a venue for introducing new directions in the field, analyzing the development and definition of the field itself, and considering the place of German Jewish Studies within the disciplines of both German Studiesand Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. The contributions are organized in three sections according to their approach to German JewishStudies: theoretical and philosophical, literary-historical, or approaches that focus on the Jew(s) in today's Germany. Contributors: Nicola Behrmann, Juliette Brungs, Katja Garloff, Sander L. Gilman, Jeffrey A. Grossman, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Michael G. Levine, Elizabeth Loentz, Agnes C. Mueller, Todd Samuel Presner, Lisa Silverman, David Suchoff. William C. Donahue is Professor in German, in Jewish Studies, and in the Programin Literature at Duke University, where he is also a member of the Jewish Studies Executive Committee and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. Martha B. Helfer is Professor and Chair of the Department of German, Russian, and Eastern European Languages and Literatures and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University.Trade ReviewWhat is most impressive about a number of these essays is that the argument their authors develop with reference to specific texts could be appropriated for other texts offering similarly new insights. . . . Nexus . . . promises to contribute new and exciting perspectives to our understanding of German-Jewish philosophy, literature, and culture. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[A] welcome new series . . . [that] can be expected to become a platform for important research and debates on German Jewish literary and cultural studies. . . . [T]his is a series to which both readers and libraries would be well advised to subscribe. * RITCHIE ROBERTSON, JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction - William Collins Donahue and Martha B. Helfer German-Jewish Studies in the Digital Age: Remarks on Discipline, Method, and Media - Todd Samuel Presner Beyond Antisemitism: A Critical Approach to German Jewish Cultural History - Lisa Silverman Unrequited Love: On the Rhetoric of a Trope from Moritz Goldstein to Hannah Arendt - Katja Garloff Happiness and Unhappiness as a "Jewish Question" - Sander L. Gilman Auerbach, Heine and the Question of Bildung in German and German Jewish Culture - Jeffrey A. Grossman The Literary Double Life of Clementine Krämer: German-Jewish Activist and Bavarian "Heimat" and Dialect Writer - Elizabeth Loentz Franz Kafka, Hebrew Writer: The Vaudeville of Linguistic Origins - David Suchoff Words at War: Hugo Ball and Walter Benjamin on Language and History - Nicola Behrmann The Inability to Love? Jews and Germans in Works by Günter Grass and Martin Walser - Agnes Mueller Written into the Body: Introducing the Performance Video Art of Tanya Ury - Juliette Brungs Disfigured Memory: The Reshaping of Holocaust Symbols in Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin - Jennifer Hansen-Glücklich New Subject Positions in Recent German-Jewish Film - Michael G. Levine

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Book SynopsisSecond volume of the biennial publication of the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, making available important new research and considering the definition and development of the field of German Jewish Studies. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University, the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. It publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies and serves as a venue for introducing new directions in the field, analyzing the development and definition of the field itself, and considering the place of German Jewish Studies within the disciplines of both German Studiesand Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. The second volume of Nexus presents a special forum section on the controversial German Jewish religious historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-80), including contributions by Julius H. Schoeps, Hans J. Hillerbrand, Eric M. Meyers, Laura Lieber, Noah B. Strote, and Paul Reitter, as well as cutting-edge essays thathighlight important new developments in the field of German Jewish Studies. Contributors: Nick Block, Abigail Gillman, Anton Hieke, Hans J. Hillerbrand, Martin Kagel, Richard S. Levy, Laura Lieber, Eric M. Meyers, Andrea Reiter, Paul Reitter, Julius H. Schoeps, Noah B. Strote, Karina von Tippelskirch. William C. Donahue is Bishop-MacDermott Family Professor of Germanic Languages & Literature, and Professor, Program in Literature andJewish Studies, Duke University. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.Trade Review[A] welcome new series [that] responds to the present state of German Jewish studies . . . with a combination of theoretical reflections and cultural case studies . . . . This series can be expected to become a platform for important research and debates on German Jewish literary and cultural studies . . . . [T]his is a series to which both readers and libraries would be well advised to subscribe. -- Ritchie Robertson * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction Introduction to the Nexus Forum: A Most Unwanted Man: Hans-Joachim Schoeps Jew, Prussian, German: The Adventuresome Story of Hans-Joachim Schoeps Hans-Joachim Schoeps: Contrarian Scholar The Meyerowitz Family from Königsberg: Contemporaries of Hans-Joachim Schoeps From the Margins: A Response to Schoeps on Schoeps A Conservative Christian Welcome: A Response to Julius Schoeps Facing His Nazi Past? A Response to Schoeps on Schoeps Setting the Record Straight Regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Fool's Errand? A Discussion of the "German" Dimension of Reform Judaism in Select Congregations in Three American Southern States, 1860-1880 Weimar on Broadway: Fritz Kortner and Dorothy Thompson's Refugee Play Another Sun If I forget thee, O Jerusalem: The Jewish Exilic Mind in Else Lasker-Schüler's IchundIch "Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören können von einander": Martin Buber's Message to Postwar Germany Hungerkünstler: George Tabori Directs Kafka in Bremen (1977) Performing the Jew in Austria after Waldheim: Robert Menasse's Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle

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Book SynopsisBiennial volume of new and innovative essays on German Jewish Studies, featuring forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish Studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 3 features special forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Renowned Heine scholar Jeffrey Sammons offers a magisterial critical retrospective on this towering "German Jewish" author, followed by a response from Ritchie Robertson, while the deanof Kraus scholarship, Edward Timms, reflects on the challenges and rewards of translating German Jewish dialect into English. Paul Reitter provides a thoughtful response. Contributors: Angela Botelho, Jay Geller, Abigail Gillman, Jeffrey A. Grossman, Leo Lensing, Georg Mein, Paul Reitter, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Egon Schwarz, Edward Timms, Liliane Weissberg, Emma Woelk. William Collins Donahue is the John J. CavanaughProfessor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, where he chairs the Department of German and Russian. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, TheState University of New Jersey.Table of ContentsIntroduction - William Collins Donahue and Martha B. Helfer "Ein weites Feld": Ein Wort zu deutsch-jüdischen Studien anläßlich der Verleihung des ersten Egon Schwarz Prize for the Best Essay in German Jewish Studies - Egon Schwarz "An Open Field": A Word about German Jewish Studies on the Occasion of the Presentation of the first Egon Schwarz Prize for the Best Essay in German Jewish Studies - Egon Schwarz Laudatio for Abigail Gillman's Prize-Winning Nexus Essay: "Martin Buber's Message to Postwar Germany" - Martha B. Helfer Heinrich Heine in Modern German History, by an Eyewitness - Jeffery L. Sammons Jeffrey Sammons, Heine, and Me: Some Autobiographical Reflections - Ritchie Robertson Heine's Disparate Legacies: A Response to Jeffrey Sammons - Jeffrey A. Grossman My Debt to Heine and Sammons - Abigail Gillman Die letzten Tage der Menschheit as a German-Jewish Tragicomedy, and the Challenge to Translators - Edward Timms Edward Timms's "Die letzten Tage der Menschheit as a German-Jewish Tragicomedy and the Challenge to Translators": A Response - Paul Reitter Kraus the Mouse? Kafka's Late Reading of Die Fackel and the Vagaries of Literary History - Leo Lensing The Parable of the Rings: Sigmund Freud Reads Lessing - Liliane Weissberg The Poetics of the Polis: Remarks on the Latency of the Literary in Hannah Arendt's Concept of Public Space - Georg Mein The Marrano in Modernity: The Case of Karl Gutzkow - Angela Botelho German Jews Dogged by Destiny: Werewolves and Other Were-Canids in the Works of Heinrich Heine and Curt Siodmak - Jay Geller Authenticity, Distance, and the East German Volksstück: Yiddish in Thomas Christoph Harlan's Ich Selbst und Kein Engel - Emma Woelk

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Book SynopsisA new evaluation of one of the most significant Holocaust poets, Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), offering the first sustained critical analysis of Sachs's largely unanalyzed pre-war poetry and prose. Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) has long been regarded as one of the most significant Holocaust poets. Her conception of language and words as a landscape has been understood by scholars and critics as an exilic ersatz Heimat for the lost German homeland of a displaced poet. This reading, however, is based entirely on her postwar poems. Such an isolated approach to her complex body of work is increasingly historically problematic; it is also at odds with Sachs's generally cyclical poetic process. In "The Space of Words," Jennifer Hoyer offers the first sustained critical analysis of Sachs's largely unanalyzed prewar poetry and prose, as well as the first analysis that examines structural and thematic ties between the prewar works and the Nobel Prize-winning postwar poetry. Through close readings of both Sachs's prewar and postwar works, Hoyer reveals a diasporic rather than exilic conception of the landscape of language, a position of constant wandering rather than static longing for return. This diasporic poetics promotes the intellectual and linguistic power of the wanderer and opens new insights into Sachs's essentialsignificance as a Holocaust poet and a twentieth-century German-Jewish writer wary of the link of literary language to geopolitics and the narrative of nations. Jennifer M. Hoyer is Assistant Professor of German at theUniversity of Arkansas.Trade ReviewJennifer M. Hoyer's book takes a long-needed fresh look at [Sachs's] works and public persona . . . . [It] draw[s] on fascinating Jewish discourses of space and language. It places Sachs provocatively in proximity to 'countermonument artists' such as Art Spiegelman and far from the image of a non-intellectual writer of memorializing monuments. . . . One of the merits and innovations of Hoyer's study is the analysis of two whole cycles of poems, 'Flügel der Prophetie' . . . and 'Dein Leib im Rauch durch die Luft' . . . . Few previous critics have seen the desirability of a cyclical reading of Sachs's poems; even fewer have attempted such a reading. There is much to be learnt from Hoyer's cyclical readings . . . . [I]nteresting, innovative, and noteworthy . . . . [W]ill provoke discussion and debate for scholars of Jewish Studies and of German Literature . . . . * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Hard, wearying, detailed academic toil has clearly gone into producing this book... The result is more than admirable, and fascinating. There is too little space to even begin with the details, but through them the richness of Sachs' work is clear. * MANCHESTER REVIEW OF BOOKS *Table of Contents"An Stelle von Heimat": An Introduction Biography of the Poet:: "a frail woman must do it" Wandering and Words, Wandering in Words Sach's Merlin the Sorcerer: Reconfiguring the Myth as Plural Poetic Space after the Abyss Israel Is Not Only Land: Diasporic Poetry Relearning to Listen: Sachs's Poem Cycle "Dein Leib im Rauch durch die Luft" Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA re-examination of the social processes behind religious conversions in the Ancient and Early Middle Ages. This volume explores religious conversion in late antique and early medieval Europe at a time when the utility of the concept is vigorously debated. Though conversion was commonly represented by ancient and early medieval writersas singular and personally momentous mental events, contributors to this volume find gradual and incomplete social processes lurking behind their words. A mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge and spark new thinking across a variety of sub-fields. The historical settings treated here stretch from the Roman Hellenism of Justin Martyr in the second century to the ninth-century programs of religious and moral correction by resourceful Carolingian reformers. Baptismal orations, funerary inscriptions, Christian narratives about the conversion of stage-performers, a bronze statue of Constantine, early Byzantine ethnographic writings, and re-located relics are among the book's imaginative points of entry. This focused collection of essays by leading scholars, and the afterword by Neil McLynn, should ignite conversations among students of religious conversion andrelated processes of cultural interaction, diffusion, and change both in the historical sub-fields of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and well beyond. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion: Old Worlds and New, is also published by the Universityof Rochester Press. Contributors: Susan Elm, Anthony Grafton, Richard Lim, Rebecca Lyman, Michael Maas, Neil McLynn, Kenneth Mills, Eric Rebillard, Julia M. H. Smith, Raymond Van Dam.Trade ReviewOffer[s] key insights into the study of religious conversion across various 'subfields of history'. . . impressive contributions to the reassessment of the role of religion in history. * COMITATUS *Table of ContentsInscriptions and Conversions: Gregory of Nazianzus on Baptism - Susanna Elm The Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr's Conversion as a Problem of "Hellenization" - Rebecca Lyman Conversion and Burial in the Late Roman Empire - Eric Rebillard Converting the Un-Christianizable: The Baptism of Stage Performers in Late Antiquity - Richard Lim The Many Conversions of the Emperor Constantine - Raymond Van Dam "Delivered from Their Ancient Customs": Christianity and the Question of Cultural Change in Early Byzantine Ethnography - Michael Maas "Emending Evil Ways and Praising God's Omnipotence": Einhard and the Uses of Roman Martyrs - Julia M. H. Smith Seeing and Believing: Aspects of Conversion from Antoninus Pius to Louis the Pious - Neil McLynn

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Book SynopsisArguably, no historical thinker has had as varied and fractious a reception within modern Judaism as Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–77), the seventeenth-century philosopher, pioneering biblical critic, and Jewish heretic from Amsterdam. Revered in many circles as the patron saint of secular Jewishness, he has also been branded as the worst traitor to the Jewish people in modern times. Jewish philosophy has cast Spinoza as marking a turning point between the old and the new, as a radicalizer of the medieval tradition and table setter for the modern. He has served as a perennial landmark and point of reference in the construction of modern Jewish identity. This volume brings together excerpts from central works in the Jewish response to Spinoza. True to the diversity of Spinoza's Jewish reception, it features a mix of genres, from philosophical criticism to historical fiction, from tributes to diary entries, providing the reader with a sense of the overall historical development of Spinoza's posthumous legacy.

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Book SynopsisBorn in a small river town in the largely Muslim province of Sandzak, Munevera Hadzisehovic grew up in an area sandwiched between the Orthodox Christian regions of Montenegro and Serbia, cut off from other Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her story takes her from the rural culture of the early 1930s through the massacres of World War II and the repression of the early communist regime to the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It sheds light on the history of Yugoslavia from the interwar kingdom to the break-up of the socialist state. Hadzisehovic paints a picture not only of her own life, but also of the lives of other Muslims, especially women, in an era and an area of great change. Readers are given a loving yet accurate portrait of Muslim customs pertaining to the household, gardens, food and dating - in short, of everyday life. She writes from the inside out, starting with her emotions and experiences, then moving outward to the facts that concern those interested in this region: the role of the Ustashe, Chetniks and Germans in World War II; the attitude of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia toward Muslims; and the tragic state of ethnic relations that led to war again in the 1990s. Some of Hadzisehovic's experiences and many of her views may be controversial. She speaks of Muslim women's reluctance to give up the veil, the disapproval of mixed marriages and the problems between Serb and Croat nationals. Her benign view of Italian occupation is in stark contrast to her depiction of bloodthirsty Chetnik irregulars. Her analysis of Belgrade's Muslims suggests that class differences were just as important as religious affiliation. In this personal story, Hadzisehovic mourns the loss of two worlds - the orderly Muslim world of her childhood and the secular, multi-ethnic world of communist Yugoslavia.

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Book SynopsisThis book tells a story, a story about America’s spiritual capital. Spiritual capital is the fund of beliefs, examples, and commitments that are transmitted from generation to generation through a religious tradition, and which attach people to the transcendent source of fulfillment and happiness. America has created the greatest civilization the world has ever know, and it has done this because of its spiritual capital, the values and beliefs by which individual Americans have interpreted and transformed the world. The Judeo-Christian heritage has historically served as the spiritual capital of America. It is not only the spiritual quest of modernity, but that quest has evolved into globalization, and America, because of its spiritual capital, has been able to provide leadership for that quest. The larger thesis is that America is by virtue of its specific spiritual capital heritage not only the beneficiary of its advantages but also the leading exemplar of the spiritual quest of modernity. It is because is engaged in a spiritual quest that it can exercise world leadership as opposed to domination and oppression. The authors examine the extent to which economic development, growth, and entrepreneurship depend on spiritual capital. They argue that there is a symbiotic relation between America’s spiritual capital and our political institutions and freedoms. The argument here is that the substantive spiritual vision supports the political and economic procedural norms of a free society. Like any form of capital, spiritual capital may lie dormant or be wasted, it may be used productively, it may be augmented, and it may be diminished or eroded. In the final chapter, we point out how the heritage is under assault from a variety of sources and what happens when scientific, technological, economic, and political institutions are detached from their spiritual roots. The result is a natural progression from governmental bureaucratic centralization to secularism to reductive materialism and ultimately to a social-collectivist conception of human welfare. Within the story there is an argument, namely, that these achievements will not be sustained without that heritage, and for all of the above reasons the heritage needs to be reaffirmed. The authors argue that the future of modernity, globalization, and America depend on the extent to which there is a reaffirmation of America’s spiritual capital.

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Book SynopsisThe history of the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association's basketball team and the legends it spawnedTrade Review"[A]n extremely well-researched book, one that captures in detail a bygone era, and belongs on the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in basketball history." — Providence Journal"Douglas Stark has made a valuable contribution in bringing back to life a vibrant era in early basketball history. His portraits of the players, their fans, and such memorable figures as team founder Eddie Gottlieb and announcer Dave Zinkoff will entertain and instruct lovers of not only basketball but also American urban history." —Lee Lowenfish, author of Branch Rickey: Baseball's Ferocious GentlemanTable of ContentsPreface1. On the Road2. A Jewish Game3. A New League, a New Team4. Prospect Hall and the Vissies5. Shikey6. Howard the Red7. Saturday Night SPHAS' Habit8. The Darlings of Philadelphia9. Rosenberg to the Rescue10. Basketball and War11. The Influx of New York Players12. Losing Home Court13. The End of the Line14. Playing it StraightEpilogue: Memories Live OnAcknowledgmentsAppendix A: Game-by-Game Standings for the SPHAS, American Basketball LeagueAppendix B: Year-by-Year Standings for the SPHASAppendix C: SPHAS Versus other Philadelphia Professional TeamsAll-Time SPHAS RosterBibliography

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Book SynopsisThe religion of Islam and the mainstream Muslim majority have been conflated with the beliefs and actions of an extremist minority. The result was reflected in a USA Today/Gallup Poll which found substantial minorities of Americans admitting to negative feelings or prejudice against Muslims.The vital missing piece among the many voices weighing in on this question is the actual views of Muslim publics.Who Speaks for Islam? is about this silenced majority. It is the product of a mammoth research study undertaken over six years by the Gallup Organization. Gallup conducted tens of thousands of hour-long face to face interviews with residents of more than 35 predominantly Muslim nations. In totality we surveyed a sample representing over 90% of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, making this the largest, most comprehensive study of contemporary Muslims ever done.

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Book SynopsisOsama bin Laden's words carry a great deal of weight in the West. When he speaks, or allegedly speaks, we listen. But what about the words of other key leaders in the Al-Qa'ida terrorist network? We can learn how to conduct the war on terrorism more successfully when we study their own manuals, written for their followers.

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Book SynopsisTerrorist organizations have been able to market mass murder under hysteria's banner of alleged martyrdom. But when it comes to understanding Islamic suicide terrorism in particular, there is much more to it than martyrdom.

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Book SynopsisIn this magisterial work, leading cultural critic Mary Eberstadt delivers an influential new theory about the decline of religion in the Western world. The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt turns this standard account on its head. Marshaling an impressive array of research, from fascinating historical data on family decline in pre-Revolutionary France to contemporary popular culture both in the United States and Europe, Eberstadt shows the reverse is also true: the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself. Drawing on sociology, history, demography, theology, literature, and many other sources, Eberstadt shows that family decline and religious decline have gone hand in hand in the Western world in a way that has not been understood before—that they are, as she puts it in a striking new image summarizing the book’s thesis, “the double helix of society, each dependent on the strength of the other for successful reproduction.” In sobering final chapters, Eberstadt then lays out the enormous ramifications of the mutual demise of family and faith in the West. While it is fashionable in some circles to applaud the decline of both religion and the nuclear family, there are, as Eberstadt reveals, enormous social, economic, civic, and other costs attendant on both declines. Her conclusion considers this compelling question: whether the economic and demographic crisis now roiling Europe and spreading to America will have the unintentional result of reviving the family as the most viable alternative to the failed welfare state—fallout that could also lay the groundwork for a religious revival as well.How the West Really Lost God is a startlingly original account of how secularization happens and a sweeping brief about why everyone should care. A book written for agnostics as well as believers, atheists as well as “none of the above,” it will permanently change the way every reader understands the two institutions that have hitherto undergirded Western civilization as we know it—family and faith—and the fundamental nature of the relationship between those two pillars of history.Trade Review“An absolutely brilliant and strikingly fresh portrait of the ‘double-helix’ of faith and family, coupled with a potentially game-changing analysis of the why and how of secularization, all written with the sparkle and empathy that characterize the work of one of America’s premier social analysts." —George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C. “You cannot understand the real philosophical problems of the West–which have been mounting for 40 years—without reading Mary Eberstadt’s new book How the West Really Lost God.”—Jonathan V. Last, author of What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster “How the West Really Lost God” is a clear, compelling and ultimately convincing presentation of the relationship between faith and family. It’s not a call to action. But it doesn’t need to be. The Church has already told Christians what to do. The book just dispels any lingering doubts about the necessity of doing it. —Emily Stimpson, Our Sunday Visitor “Every Christian leader who’s interested in engaging today’s culture (and who shouldn’t be?) should have this book on his or her desk. Her research and historical perspectives are fascinating, and I’m confident that she’ll give you enormous new information that will help you engage today’s non-believing culture more effectively.” —Phil Cooke, The Christian News Journal "Her short, elegantly written book repeatedly shows that strong families help to keep the religious practice alive and that too many people see a causal connection running exclusively in the opposite direction."—The Economist “A short column cannot do justice to the wide and deep reading and all the evidence Eberstadt has marshaled for her argument, so you are urged to read this book. What is certain is that this is one of those books that will forever change the conversation about why Christianity is in decline in the West.” —Crisis Magazine “In her deeply insightful new book, How the West Really Lost God, Mary Eberstadt suggests that there is a more fundamental cause underlying the cultural loss of religion—a cause that all the previous research has mistaken for just another effect. What if the decline of religion is integrally connected to, and perhaps even a result of, the decline of the natural family?” —Washington Times

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